I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Not normally what I'd post, but let's just say every witch needs to know fire safety and effective methods.
I love this so much
A tarot spread to check and see what part of your wards could use some repair. Useful to those who find sensing energy difficult.
Do not repost. Image made using Krita.
Leslie Vigil on IG
Love spell jar
♡ Dried rose petals
♡ Cinnamon
♡ Witch Hazel
♡ Majorum
♡ Lavender
♡ Rose quartz
♡ Fennel Seeds
♡ Dried Orange peel
♡ Heart shaped snow quartz crystal
♡ Honey
♡ Sugar
♡ Moon Water
♡ Sealed with pink candle
I see you unfollowing. Good. Don’t fucking stop. This blog is pro choice, pro gay, pro black, pro trans, pro sex work, pro go fuck yourself
Ingredients: • ¾ cup/180ml of culinary grade dried rose petals (or fresh pesticide free petals) • 1 cup/250ml of unrefined granulated/castor sugar (or sugar of choice) • 1 cup/250ml of filtered water Method: Put all ingredients in a stove top pot and simmer on medium low heat for 30 minutes or longer, until rose petals lose colour and the sugar is dissolved. Turn off heat and let sit on stove for 45 minutes to an hour steeping, you can add more rose petals if you want even more flavour. After steeping strain the liquid twice through a mesh strainer and store in an airtight container/glass. Refrigeration is recommended for guaranteed freshness.
After a rough couple months of mental health, all my wards and shields kinda… fell by the wayside. Since I’ve been putting them back up, I thought I’d offer a general explanation of how I do it.
Basically, I use a form of sympathetic magic to reduce the toll my wards take on me. Otherwise it has to be an obnoxiously complex multi day process. Since this works just as well, I don’t see the point in putting myself through that.
So clearly it comes in handy if you have limited energy reserves, but it’s also useful if you have issues visualizing. I’ve included another method to make this work specifically for folks with visualization issues.
Supplies
All you need is a few writing utensils in assorted colors and some paper, or an image editing program. It doesn’t need to be a fancy one, you can literally do this in Paint if that’s what you’ve got.
The Prep Work
For the sake of convenience (and also not publicly posting my actual house on the internet like a dingus) I’m gonna be using a random Sims 3 lot for this post. Say hi to our demo house:
We’ve got the house, so now we’re gonna map the place!
If your place is on its own lot, include the whole lot. I like to do this from a top down view so if I’m struggling I can go to Google Earth and get a reference.
But since I’m using the Sims for this demonstration I’m gonna just… shift the camera angle.
So, from here you’re going to mark off the property line, walls of the house, trees, gardens, paths, frences, decks, etc. Whatever you think is relevant.
It doesn’t have to be perfect or 100 percent straight, just enough you can tell what’s going on.
This is what I ended up with for the demo house:
So yeah, clearly it doesn’t have to be perfect, just close enough you have everything of importance covered.
This is a lot sloppier than I’d normally do it since it was like 5 AM and I wanted my bed, but it would still work because I don’t really do a ton with plants so the missing tree and chunk of garden aren’t a big deal to me.
(That said, be smarter than me when you’re doing this for realsies. Don’t do it for real when you’re about to drop from exhaustion.)
So, now you set up your external protections.
For this exercise I picked a fire based ward for the property line to incinerate malicious magic and deter anybody nasty, a ward filler that was inspired by Apollo and made up of golden arrows that will sap the strength of malicious magic and cause extreme discomfort to people with less than honorable intentions who got through the first ward, a fog based ward to slow/delay any intruders and to hold any magic that gets through the rest of it till it dissipates, and a sanitization ward at the front porch and the back deck because I’m an empath and don’t like taking residual crud from outside into my house.
You can set these up in a few ways, but I’ll be including one with visualization and one without so this doesn’t get any longer than it already is.
The Procedure: Visualization Edition
Drag your finger along the lines of the diagram and visualize the ward going up on that part of your property. While you do, focus on what you want your ward to look like, how it feels, what you want it to do, how strong you want it to be, where you want it how you want it to react to an attempted breach, etc. That’s it!
It’s still going to take energy, but the drain on your resources should be a lot smaller.
The Procedure: Not Visualizing Edition
So, this is a little more complicated but not too much so. You might want to make a few copies of your diagram (or take a couple pictures on your phone. Just in general replicate it a couple of times.) just in case, because you’re gonna draw your wards.
Grab some pens/pencils/markers in colors that correspond to your wards (or pick colors in your graphics program if you’re going the tech magic route)- elemental affinity, purpose, both, up to you.
Using my example wards, I ended up with this:
Since you’re not visualizing, focus on the intent as effectively as you can while you’re drawing, because you’re gonna speak (or think!) those suckers into existence.
Describe what you want it to look like, what you’d want it to do, how strong you want it to be, where you want it how you want it to react to an attempted breach, etc. All the same things you’d be visualizing if you were going that route.
If you’re confident in your art skills, you can save a bit of energy by not focusing as much on what you want it to look like and drawing a direct representation of your ward instead. (I’m not fantastic, so I’m sitting there adding stuff like “this red line is a wall of fire taller than the house” into my description. Still works!)
This is a little less energy efficient than the visualization method in my experience but it’s still heaps better than doing it all on a large scale.
So that’s the process! It’s the same deal inside your place, except instead of rocks, trees, and decks you’ll be marking windows, doors, and furniture.
Feel free to modify the method here however you see fit, and if you do I’d love to hear about it!
Salted Rose and Honey Pie
The Wild Called Me Back.
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